This week The Cutting Room eyes up a tasty treat coming to your television screens in a couple of weeks.
The Walking Dead (Season Five)
Former police officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) continues to lead his band of survivors through the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. At the end of the previous season they had made it to the supposed safe haven of Terminus, but if there’s one thing that we’ve learned from post-apocalyptic dramas over the years it’s that more often than not it’s the other people rather than the zombies that are the biggest threat. Buckle up, folks, this ride is about to get rough.
Why we’re looking forward to this: It’s The Walking Dead! Season Five! Back on TV! As Stan Lee would say, “’Nuff Said!”
You need more? After a short but superb first season, a slight stumble in the second, and a convincing recovery in the third, the fourth season of The Walking Dead finally hit its stride and delivered a solid, suspenseful and extremely satisfying fourth season. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
Effectively tying up the outstanding plot issues of the previous three seasons — including a shocking demise for a long standing beloved character (though not a surprising one as The Walking Dead is second only to Game Of Thrones for low job security) and a brilliant turn by David Morrissey as The Governor that actually managed to make us feel sympathetic towards his character before he got his own final comeuppance. Season four delivered a rich vein of character development that has us more emotionally invested in the current survivors than we’ve ever been. As a result our nerves are already beginning to fray, and you’re sure to find us with very short fingernails when season five kicks off on 12 October.
Those of us at This Is Horror who have been reading the comic version since it debuted over a decade ago are inevitably speculating as to where this new season will go. We’ve seen suggestions of cannibalism in Terminus at the end of the last season, and the fact that much of the regular cast ended up locked in a boxcar doesn’t bode well for them. Several new characters from the comic turned up towards the end of the last season, among them Sergeant Abraham Ford (Michael Kudlitz) and scientist Eugene Porter (Josh McDermitt) who claims to know the cause of the zombie outbreak, but as we’ve seen with others, most notably Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal) and Hershel Greene (Scott Wilson), the direction of the two universes are often wildy different from one another.
As a result we’re always on the edge of our seats because anything can happen on the AMC show and frequently does, wrong footing us with alarming frequency and delivering emotional sucker punches when we’re least expecting them. We’re being told that nobody is safe this season, and coupled with a trailer that’s grimmer than a fortnight in Blackpool we can honestly say that we’re both anticipating and dreading the next four months of The Walking Dead.
The Walking Dead (season five) premieres in the US on 12 October and on Fox in the UK the following evening.
